I Don’t Know.

In hospitality, it was one of the first things I learned… Ok, maybe the second. The first was that if I wanted to have every weekend and holiday off, I needed a new career. The second thing was, ‘I don’t know.’ Verbatim. Often times, it’s followed with a “…, but let me check.”

As a new employee, you come in as the green and malleable rookie. You go through your training and then you are left to fend for yourself. Sink or swim. Thankfully, most times you are given floaties (a.k.a. your trainer). You start to gain your confidence, and then a guest asks you a question that leaves you dumbfounded and you have to utter those three words. Of course, you don’t know! You just got there.

Since I firmly planted my foot in the hospitality industry, I hated to not know something. In turn, it would give me great pleasure to have the answer to someone’s question. Blame it on the nerd in me.

We live in the information age with the answers to our questions at our fingertips – except for the existential ones. If someone asks me a question, to which I do not know the answer, I must find out. I find myself hating more and more to not know. But why? So what if I don’t know that cheetahs run faster than 60mph or that the dot over the i and j is called a tittle, or that it’s impossible to hum and hold your nose.

All this useless information, in my brain rolling around because of the need to know :). Maybe I’ll mentally go back to my rookie hospitality days and I’ll say, “you know what, I really don’t know.”